I start the chronology in the Department, with courses on Old and Middle English language and literature, and the history of the English language. I am especially interested in Anglo-Scandinavian relations towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, and, in the later period, late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century devotional texts. My research has mainly been on the Wycliffite attempt to bring education, and especially religious education, to the people. My publications include an edition of a handbook for itinerant Wycliffite preachers, and essays on various Wycliffite texts, including a set of sermons in Latin, a movingly personal letter written from prison, and a startling reworking of that early Middle English guide for anchoresses, the Ancrene Riwle. I am currently examining a similarly reworked Apocalypse Commentary. Having recently prepared the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Thomas Gascoigne, chaplain to Henry VI and several times Chancellor of Oxford, I also find myself increasingly interested in later pre-Reformation attempts at church reform. I am currently writing on Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” as well as some late nineteenth-century popularizations of the Canterbury Tales.

Courses

Graduate: Literature and Piety in Late Middle Ages; Fifteenth-Century Poetry; Medieval Dream Poetry; Politics of Literacy in Late Medieval England.

Cross-Listed Graduate and Undergraduate: History of the English Language; Old English; Old English Poetry; Beowulf; The Anglo-Saxons; Medieval Drama.

Undergraduate: Greek Thought and Literature; Survey of English Literature; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales; Chaucer, Early Poetry, and Troilus and Criseyde; From the Annals of Wales to Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Middle English Texts; Readings in Old and Middle English Literature; Readings in Middle English Literature.

Selected Publications

Articles on John Bankin (fl. 1382), Thomas Gascoigne (d. 1458) and John Wells (d. 1388), New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

"Lay Literacy, the Democratization of God's Law, and the Lollards," in The Bible as Book: The Manuscript Tradition, ed. John Sharpe and Kimberly Van Kampen (London and New Castle: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 1998), 177-95.

"Richard Wyche, a Certain Knight, and the Beginning of the End," in Lollardy and the Gentry, ed. Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 127-54.

"'O, why ne had y lerned for to die?' Lerne for to Dye and the Author's Death in Thomas Hoccleve's Series, in Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell in the Middle Ages, ed. Allen J. Frantzen, Essays in Medieval Studies, 10 (1993), pp. 27-51.